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THIS IS IT! arrives in Ipswich on Monday 9th Feb at Suffolk County Council for a day of talks, workshops and activities for young people starting a career in the creative & cultural industries.

Participants can join us and other like-minded creatives for a full day of interactive sessions led by Events Manager Andrea De La Cruz, along with inspirational speeches and group activities designed to develop the future creative workforce.

Morning workshops will be led by The Before I Die Network, who will help attendees identify their career goals and how to achieve them. A panel of arts professionals will be on hand in the afternoon to tell participants all about their paths to employment in the creative industries. Speakers include Mike Smith, President of Music at Virgin EMI, Stephen Skrypec, Head of Sales and Marketing at New Wolsey Theatre and Leah Kurta from the youth-focussed creative entrerprise The Mix.

The shadow culture minister Chris Bryant has opened a heated debate, calling for the democratisation of access the arts and citing Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt as examples of the privileged elite. An ‘open letter’ was written by James Blunt in return, which can be read here. We support Bryant’s argument that Fair Access to jobs in the arts are integral to the future of the sector; let us know what you think by joining the debate on Twitter.

Photograph: Andy Hall/Rex for The Guardian

The arts world must address the dominance of performers like Eddie Redmayne, James Blunt and their ilk who come from privileged backgrounds, according to Labour’s new shadow culture minister.

In his first interview in the job, Chris Bryant said one of his priorities if he became a minister would be to encourage diversity and fairer funding in the arts. In particular, he suggested that Labour would try to address a “cultural drought” afflicting areas outside London and the south-east because of lower funding, as well as encouraging the arts world to hire people from a variety of backgrounds.

“I am delighted that Eddie Redmayne won [a Golden Globe for best actor], but we can’t just have a culture dominated by Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk,” he said.

“Where are the Albert Finneys and the Glenda Jacksons? They came through a meritocratic system. But it wasn’t just that. It was also that the writers were writing stuff for them. So is the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, doing that kind of gritty drama, which reflects [the country] more? We can’t just have Downton programming ad infinitum and think that just because we’ve got some people in the servants’ hall, somehow or other we’ve done our duty by gritty drama.”

The 33-year-old actor Redmayne attended Eton College, while 40-year-old singer James Blunt went to Harrow school in north-west London. Bryant’s comments echo those of actor David Morrissey, who last year said the arts were being closed off to many young people by a culture of elitism.

“The truth is that people who subsidise the arts most are artists themselves,” Bryant said. “That of course makes it much more difficult if you come from a background where you can’t afford to do that. I’m delighted that Arts Council England have done more on their apprenticeship scheme, but I think a lot more museums, galleries, arts companies need to pay not just lip service to or tick the box of diversity, but embed themselves in a much wider community to increase access.”

Bryant said Labour would not force the arts world to open up, but would strongly encourage those in the creative industries to look at the way people join the sector. “It is something the industry needs to do and we need to look at how the BBC fosters talent,” he said.

“Sometimes it is just saying to arts organisations: what are you actually doing to extend your reach here, or is everyone just going to be an arts graduate from Cambridge?”

The problem does not just lie with those working in the arts world, but those who are consuming culture, he suggested.

Challenging theatres to increase their appeal to a wider range of social groups, he said: “It’s great to have a £10 a ticket system, but if all the £10 tickets are being sold to people who were buying them for £50 the week before, then that’s no great gain. I’m not going to tell the National Theatre how to do its ticketing … but it’s always fascinated me that the National Theatre has no windows out on to the community in which it sits, just windows on to the Thames.”

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Read the full article in The Guardian here, including James Blunt’s open reply and Bryant’s subsequent response.

Young people need help and support to find work, not benefit cuts and constant scapegoating as an idle underclass, writes The Creative Society’s Martin Bright for The Guardian.

Sometimes you have to wonder whether anyone in the political class knows a young person. They certainly show no evidence of any empathy and I wonder whether our current crop of politicians were ever young themselves or simply went straight from childhood into besuited middle age.

This pattern will have been repeated at every youth employment organisation across the country.

Many of the young people we work with live on their own. They have been let down by the education system and often have little or no support from their families. With few qualifications, they find it difficult to compete for even entry-level retail jobs.

We work with them to find short work experience placements, train them in basic interview technique and CV writing and encourage them to return to college to get better qualifications. This is a long, intensive process.

Last week Tara, a 17-year-old who wants to work in dance, told us that the new proposals would mean she would have to find a minimum wage job or face losing her home. Both her parents are dead and she was housed a year ago. She has been attending an employability course and currently feels she will have to give up her dream of being a dancer.

Natasha, 18, is a product of the care system and is seriously worried about what she will do for money when the new rules kick in. Even if there were a job out there for her to take, she is so underqualified, underconfident and damaged by her past that she would be unlikely to get it.

Chelsea Way, who manages our project in south-east London working with this group of young people, told me: “These proposals will take benefits away from people who are very vulnerable. They carry a lot of baggage, which makes it very difficult for them to find work. We encourage them to build up their qualifications to allow them to compete in the job market, otherwise you are simply setting them up to fail.”

At least Labour’s proposals recognise that these young people, above all, need training and education. But still I worry about the tone of these announcements in the runup to the election when all parties are looking to be tough on benefit claimants. Both Labour and the Conservatives are committed to removing young people from the benefit system and putting them into work, but these announcements are being couched in highly aggressive terms as ways of cutting the benefit bill and cracking down on scroungers.

The political climate in these times of austerity means that the humanity is being sucked from this debate. Those working at the frontline know that young people can be their own worst enemy: they can be surly, self-defeating and yes, sometimes they can even be lazy. But for the most part this is not the case.

Young people need help finding work and they need to help themselves, but the jobs need to be there for them to do and they need to be equipped to apply for them.

Instead an unpleasant undercurrent has entered the discussion which suggests there is a lumpen, idle youth underclass. Targeting young unemployed people as a way of gaining an electoral advantage does not look big or clever to me, it looks very much like bullying.

This article was published on 7 October 2014. Click here to read the original on theguardian.com.

Nick Cohen argues for The Observer that politics, journalism and the arts all increasingly controlled by nice people from wealthy backgrounds. And their niceness is strangling us. Read the article online here.

Decades back, when the young Judi Dench starred as Juliet, her mother and father joined the cast. In Act 3 Juliet learns that Romeo has killed her cousin, and cries: “Where is my father, and my mother?”

“Here we are, darling,” shouted her parents from the stalls, “in row H!”

You cannot imagine the parents of today’s stars being so gauche. They come from a world that is closer to David Cameron’s Bullingdon Club than Dench’s Quaker roots in Yorkshire. The forthcoming Riot Club – which bears the subtitle “Filthy. Rich. Spoilt. Rotten” – is meant to satirise David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson’s days at the Buller. Unintentionally it will also satirise itself. To put it as kindly as I can, the producers did not have to search far to find actors who could give a convincing impersonation of inherited privilege. Max Irons – son of Jeremy, since you asked – plays one of the sleek young beasts. Freddie Fox, son of Edward, another. The only difference between them and the current leadership of the Tory party is that they went into acting rather than politics. If there is a danger of reading too much into their slipping into their fathers’ shoes, there is also a danger of reading too little. The careers of Edward and James Fox show there have always been upper-class actors, and I would not have it any other way. It’s just that with Damian Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Dominic West, there are so many of them. In arts that boast that they “celebrate diversity” everyone looks the same.

Dame Judi tells the Observer today aspiring actors beg her for money to help fund their training. She worries that acting may become an elite occupation for the children of the rich, because no one else will be able to meet the costs and take the risks. Ben Stephenson, the BBC’s head of drama, said much the same at the Edinburgh festival but did not add that television is a racket, too. You cannot get a job in broadcasting unless you are prepared to work as an intern. In most cases, you cannot work as an intern unless you have family money to feed and house you.

But then who am I to criticise Stephenson when journalism is as much of a rich kids’ game? Lindsey Macmillan of the Institute of Education found that journalists used to come from families 6% better off than average, whereas now they come from homes that are 42% richer. Indeed, British journalists, the supposed tribunes of the people, now hail from wealthier backgrounds than, er, bankers, an awkward fact that ought to cause embarrassment all round. I look at my younger self today and wonder if he could become a journalist on a serious newspaper. My parents were teachers. They were comfortably off by the standards of 1980s Manchester, but they could never have afforded to rent me rooms in London and cover my expenses while I went from internship to internship. They had to look after my sisters as much as anything else.

The hypocrisies of British culture are enough to drive the sane paranoid, but it is not quite the class conspiracy it seems. To be sure, it is suffocating, narrow and on the edge of a descent into a mediocre mush. But not a conspiracy for all that. Working-class actors or musicians cannot live on the dole now while they struggle to break through. The sanctions from the jobcentres whip them into line. If you want to know why British pop has lost its rough energy, you should blame the Department for Work and Pensions, not a plot by the record label executives. In any case, tens of thousands of young people want to work in the arts, television, music and journalism. Why shouldn’t their potential employers, often short of money themselves, take advantage of the laws of supply and demand?

Those who receive public money have no right to do so. Working- and lower-middle-class citizens should not have to fund through their taxes and the lottery arts organisations that deny opportunities to their children. One of the most admirable men I know is Martin Bright, who threw in a career in journalism to found the Creative Society, which gives working-class teenagers the same opportunities in the arts that their middle- and upper-class contemporaries receive. Diversity creates uniformity, he says, because it ignores class. As a result, projects for women or the ethnic minorities are colonised by the middle class. The only positive discrimination that works is for arts organisations to go into jobcentres and find talented young people on the dole who deserve a break, and too few want to try it.

What applies to artists applies to the audience. The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts has told recipients of public money that they should at least think of putting Royal Opera House shows, for example, or National Theatre productions on the web once their runs are over. The overwhelming majority of people who cannot get to London, and could not afford tickets if they did, would then see the work their taxes helped pay for. It does no good. The notion that publicly funded art must be publicly available does not occur to today’s generation of cultural bureaucrats.

Expanding the range of British culture is not just an act of social justice, however. When the arts restrict their gene pool, they restrict their talent pool, too. No Premier League football club would give contracts only to children with private incomes and expect to remain in the premier league. The arts, broadcasting, serious journalism and publishing are coming dangerously close to doing just that, and its class-based culture is becoming a second-rate culture. British television drama could once boast that it was “the best in the world”. Now the best comes from America and Scandinavia. When Macmillan and her colleagues at the Institute of Education compared IQs, they found today’s younger cohort of professionals was, on average, slightly dimmer than the previous, poorer generation.

In writing this piece, I do not mean to disparage the young, privately educated journalists I see around me, the sprigs of the Fox and Irons families, the commissioning editors of the BBC and the staff of the National Theatre and Royal Opera House. They are all nice people. But there’s the rub. They are too fucking nice for Britain’s good. Their niceness is a noose that is strangling our ability to talk to ourselves and to the world.

Read more about our Fair Access campaign, which democratises access to jobs in the creative industries, here. Join the conversation on Twitter @CreativeSoc #FairAccess.

The Creative Society’s next THIS IS IT! career development day at Birmingham Hippodrome is just a fortnight away, and we have a great bunch of inspiring speakers for Creative Employment Programme attendees get excited about.

If you’re interested in illustration and graphic art, you’re in luck – with our speaker Hunt Emerson, you’ll be in the presence of a master of the form (see a sample of his genius, above). The legendary Beano Graphic Artist and Cartoonist has published around 30 titles, and his comics have been translated into 10 languages. He’s bagged several comics industry prizes, and in 2000 he was named as one of the 75 Masters of European Comics.

Next up is Music ProducerPaul Simm. During his impressive career he has worked on All Saints’ debut album and went on to co-write and produce tracks for the Sugababes, as well as collaborating with Amy Winehouse and Neneh Cherry.

Also joining the panel is one-woman tour-de-force Lisa Hassell from Inkygoodness. Lisa has been curating exhibitions and events in the UK and internationally since 2008, and has made it her mission to champion new and emerging talent in the field of illustration and graphic art worldwide. On top of this, she’s an established writer, having been published in Creative Review, Digital Arts, Creative Bloq and IdN magazine amongst others.

We also have the similarly multi-talented Anthony Lennon; an actor-cum-director who’s recently finished a stint as Assistant Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He’s followed by Spoken Word Performer Carl Sealeaf from Creative social enterprise Beatfreeks. If you’ve not heard of this social enterprise, then check them out – they’re an arts organisation supporting young, creative people (yes you!) to do what they love.

THIS IS IT! Birmingham is on 12th Oct at Birmingham’s Hippodrome. You’ll have the chance to meet each of these amazing professionals face-to-face, so don’t waste it. Give them a Google, think of some questions and make the most of their knowledge and experience. See you there!